Untitled

please reblog this so that people learn about it or whatever (10/19/23)

Binary code of a cd + dvd under a microscope

I hate Nintendo Switch Online. I hate the lack of optimization. I hate the expensive subscription service. I hate the lack of games. I hate the limited time releases. I hate that it's never gonna have the level of content that the Wii virtual console had. I hate what capitalism has done to gaming.

This collection includes: All the GBA, GB and GBC games currently available on the Switch!!

+ And a few extra bonus!! Mostly from the same series'seses

Download here for free!!: https://www.mediafire.com/file/pzycxh6zu9b8drf/GBA_Online_PC.rar (405 MB Uncompressed)

The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Those accents are common in many languages. So it was a little surprising that the bank didn't support them. The bank refused to spell their customer's name correctly, so the customer raised a GDPR complaint under Article 16.

“The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her.”

Cue much legal back and forth. The bank argued that they simply couldn't support diacritics due to their technology stack. Here's their argument (in Dutch - my translation follows)

“Bank X also explained that the current customer data management application was launched in 1995 and is still running on a US manufactured mainframe system. This system only supported EBCDIC (“extended binary-coded decimal interchange code”). This is an 8-bit standard for storing letters and punctuation marks, developed in 1963-1964 by IBM for their mainframes and AS/400 computers. The code comes from of the use of punch cards and only contains the following characters…”

(Emphasis added.) EBCDIC is an ancient (and much hated) “standard” which should have been fired into the sun a long time ago. It baffles me that it was still being used in 1995 - let alone today. Look, I'm not a lawyer (sorry mum!) so I've no idea whether this sort of ruling has any impact outside of this specific case. But, a decade after the seminal Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names essay - we shouldn't tolerate these sorts of flaws. Unicode - encoded as UTF-8 - just works. Yes, I'm sure there are some edge-cases. But if you can't properly store human names in their native language, you're opening yourself up to a lawsuit. Source GDPRhub - 2019/AR/1006

The Court of Appeal of Brussels held that, in accordance with Article 16 GDPR, the data subject has the right for their name to be correctly spelled when processed by the computer systems of the Bank. To claim in 2019 that adapting a computer system to correctly handle diacritics would cost several months of work and/or constitute additional costs for the Bank, does not allow the Bank to disregard the rights of the data subject. A correctly functioning banking institution may be expected to have computing systems that meet current standards, including the right to correct spelling of people's names.

(decided on September 10th, 2019)

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC)is an eight-bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding six-bit binary-coded decimal code used with most of IBM's computer peripherals of the late 1950s and early 1960s. [...] While IBM was a chief proponent of the ASCII standardization committee,[4] the company did not have time to prepare ASCII peripherals (such as card punch machines) to ship with its System/360 computers, so the company settled on EBCDIC.

Feel free to add why in the tags!